V. Europe.

The fifth Continent was America; but, as it is situated at the Anti- .odes, it is Europe and Asia Minor, almost coeval with it, which are
* HyAieml MomUrt, p. 47.
• It is to be remarked, harmvcr. thst Ur. Wallace doM not accept Mr. aclatcr's idea, and even ^^•9000 It. lili. Sclater suppoKA a land or continent formerly tioittug Africa, Madof^Bscar, and Indin (ml aoi Anatmlia and India; and Mr. A. K. Wallace nhows, in hU Gfographical Disfributiom n/ Amtatali and /siand Life, that the bj^pothesis of such a land i£ quite uncalled for on the allectrti HcAlcica] grounds. Bui he admits that a much closer proximity of India and Auatralia did certainly silt, and at a time so\'CTy remote that it waa "certainly pre.tcrtiar>-," adding in a private tetter Qtai "do name haa been (iven to this supposed land." Yet the land did exist, and was of course 'pR-tertiarr," for Lemuria. If we accept this name for the third Continent, had perished befun: ^***«tit fUUy dcTclopcd, and Atlantis had iiuak and ita chief portions diaappearcd before the end ol ftc Miccme period.
S THE SECRET DOCTRIKE.
generally referred to by the Iudo-Ar>'an Occultists as the fifth. Ii their teaching followed the appearance of the Continents in their geo- logical and geographical order, then this classification would have to be altered. But as the sequence of the Continents is made to follow the order of evolution of the Races, from the First to the Fifth, our Ar^'an Root-Race. Europe must be called the fifth great Continent. The Secret Doctrine takes no account of islands and peninsulas, nor does it follow the modern geographical distribution of land and sea. Siiice the day of its earliest teachings and the destruction of the great Atlantis, the face of the Earth has changed more than once. There was a time when the delta of Eg>'pt and Northern Africa belonged to Europe, before the formation of the Straits of Gibraltar and a further upheaval of the Continent entirely changed the face of the map of Europe. The last serious change occurred some 12,000 years ago,* and was followed by the submersion of Plato's little Atlantic island, which he calls Atlantis after its parent continent. Geography was part of the Mysteries, in days of old. Says the Zohar:
These secrets [of land and sea] were divulgetl to the men of the scent science, but not lo the geographcrB.T-
The claim that physical man was originally a colossal pre-tertiary giant, and that he existed 18,000,000 years ago, must of course appear preposterous to admirers of. and believers in, modem learning. The whole posse comiiaius of Biologists will turn away from the conception of this Third Race Titan of the Secondary Age, a being fit to fight successfully with the then gigantic monsters of the air, sea, and laud; so his forefathers, the ethereal prototypes of the Atlantean, had little need to fear that which could not hurt them. The modern Anthropolo- j.ist is quite welcome lo laugh at our Titans, as he laughs at the Biblical Adam, and as the Theologian laughs at the former's pithecoid ancestor The Occultists and their severe critics may feel that they have pretty well mutually squared their accounts by this time. Occult Sciences claim less and give more, at all events, than either Darwinian An- thropology or Biblical Theology.
♦ Ooe more "coinddcncc";
"Now it Is prtn-ed that in grclogrically recent times, this rcfpoii of North Africa was in fact « peninsula of Spain, and that lU union with Africa {proper) was effected on the Kortli by the rupture of r.ibraltar, and on the South by an upheaval to which the Sahara owes ita existence. The shorva of thift former Ma of Sahara atr still marked by the shclln of the same Gastropoda that live on the shores of the Mcditcrmuean." (Prof. Oscar Schmidt, Doctn'nt of Deuint amd Datwiniim, p. *^.)
t lit, fol. 1041.
GBOIOGICAX. PERIODS.
Kor ought the Esoteric Chronology to frighten anyone; for, with regard to figtires, the greatest authorities of the day are as fickle and as uncertain as the Mediterranean waves. As regards the duration of the geological periods alone, the learned men of the Royal Society are all hopelessly at sea» and jump from one million to five hundred millions of years with the utmost ease, as will be seen more than once anring this comparison.
Take one in:4tance for our present purpose — the calculations of Mr. CroU. Whether, according to this authority, 2,500.000 years represent the lime since the beginning of the Tertiary Age, or the Eocene period, as an American geologist makes him say;* or whether again Mr. Croll "allows fifteen millions since the beginning of the Eocene period," as made by the Secret Doctrine.^ For assigning as the latter does from four to five million years between the incipient and the final evolution I of the Fourth Root-Race, on tne Lemuro-Atlantean Continents; one ^■ibllion years for the Fifth, or Aryan Race, to the present date; and ^Bbout 850,000 since the submersion of the last large peninsula of the ^E^^reat Atlantis — all this may have easily taken place within the 15,000,000 years conceded by Mr. Croll to the Tertiary Age. But, chronologically speaking, the duration of the period is of secondarx* importance, as we have, after all, certain American Scientists to fall back upon. These gentlemen, unmoved by the fact that their assertions are called not
K
• A. Winchell, Profc»«>r of Gcologj-. ll^orM-Li/e, p, 369. Mr. OtaHcA Gould, late ^eolo^ca] surveyor of Tvamanta, In Mytkicat Afonatrn. p. 84. Sir Cbarlc* Lyell, who u credited witii having " happily invented " the terms Eocene, Miocene* PUoccoe. to mark thr three divtiiiun.s of Ihe Tertiary Ajf*", ought reolly to have BTttlctl iipou M>nie imalc Imcth for hia " mind-offspring:." staving left the duration or these periods, however, to apccuUUoiu pf ipedolists, the Krenlcst confuiion and perplexity arc the retiult of that happy It Bcrnu like a hopeleas ta«k to succeed in quoting a single set of fignres from one wiirk, ■MiOat the rfafc of finding it contradicted by the St WUUam Thomaon, one of the mo»t eraineiii among the modem authorities, haa changed his opiftloa about half-a-floien Umc^ upon the ngc of the Ann nnd the dnte of the consotidatJou of the KartJi'« cru«t. la Thomaon and Tail's 4\alura/ J'hilosopliy. we find only ten miUion yearn alknrcd liace the tlioe when the temperature of the Karth permitted vegetable life to appcnr on it.) iiVpp. O fltaf.; also 7>amt. Roy. Soc. Edin., xxiii. Pt. ?. 157, iSf'», where H47 is cBnccUed.j Mr. Darwin gi\*et Mr WfUiMB Thomson's eatiniAle aa " a minimum of 9S and a maximum of mo millions of ycarri niuce a* eooaoAidnlion of the crust." jSee Ch. Gould, op. dt,, p. 83.) In the same woric (^Vj/. fhii.) 80 HBt?w Kic givcu from the time of incipient incrustation to the present state of the world. And iu kH IsaK kctorv. as ahomi elacwhere. Sir William Thomson declares (tSS?) that the Sun is not older tteit 15 milUooa of yean I Meanwhile, basing his arguments as to the limits of the age of the Sun's koi. on figures previously established by Sir William Thomson, Mr. CroU allows 6c milUous of ycarv mat Ike bcflrioning of the Cambrian period. This is hopeful for the lovers of rract knowledge. Tkaa, wil*te^■cr figures are given by Uccult Science, they are var^ to be corroborated by those of some
90
THB SeCRRT DOCTRU
aaUr dttbiocts b«tt absurd.
existed so far bad
maintaio that c In I be Secondary Age. They have found human taaf fonnation: and furthermore, M. de Quatrefages finds no valivl 8cir ntific reason why man should not have existed during the 3ef >ndary Age.
The Ages and periods in Geology are, in sober truth, purely conven- tkmal term*, as they are still barely delineated, and, moreover, no two Gvologista or Naturalists agree as to the figures. Thus, there is a wide margin for choice offered to the Occultist by the learned fratemit>'. Shall we take for one of our supports Mr. T. Mellard Read? This gentleman, in a paper on " Limestone as an Index of Geological Time," read b>' him in 187S before the Royal Society, claims that the minimum time required for the fonnation of the sedimentary strata and the elimi- nation of the calcareous matter is in round numbers 600 million years;* ©T ftbail we ask support for our chronology from Mr. Darwin's works, wherein, according to his theory, he demands for the organic trans- formations from 300 to 500 million years? Sir Charles Lyell and Prof. Houghton were satisfied with placing the beginning of the Cambrian Age at 300 and 340 millions of years ago. respectively. Geologists and Zoologists claim the maximum time, though Mr. Huxley, at one lime, placed the beginning of the incrustation of the earth at 1,000 milli years ago, and would not surrender a millennium of it.
But tlic main point for us lies not in the agreement or disagreeme of the Naturalists as to the duration of geological periods, but rather their perfect accord on one point, for a wonder, and this a very impor- tant one. They all agree that during the Miocene Age — whether one or ten million years ago — Greenland and even Spitzbergen, the remnants of ovir second or Hyperborean Continent, "had an almost tropical climate." Now the pre-Homeric Greeks had preserved a vi\nd tra tion of this "Land of the Eternal Sun," whither their Apollo journey yearly. Science tells us:
Dnrldg the Miocene age, Greenland (in N. Lat. 70P) developed an abundance trees, nuch a% the yew, the redwood, the sequoia, allied to the Califomian species, becchca, pluncH, willowA, oaka, poplars and walnuts, as well as a magnolia acd uunia.t
In bhort Greenland had southern plants unknown to northern .iTions.
ae.
n
* Bee ^\-0c*^ittgt. Royal Sodety, lAodon, xxviii. sSi. t Gould, JUythuat .1 Vf lUrt, n. -i.
THE TROPICS AT THB POLK.
Id now arises this natural question. If the Greeks, in the days of [omcT, knew of a Hyperborean land, r.f., a blessed land beyond the reach of Boreas, the God of winter and of the hurricane, an ideal region which the later Greeks and their writers have vainly tried to locate beyond Scythia, a country where nights were short and days long, and beyond that a land where the Sun never set and the palm grew freely— if they knew of all this, who then told them of it ? In their day, and for ages previously, Greenland must certainly have been already covered with perpetual snows, with never-thawing ice, just as it is now. Ever>'- Ihing tends to show that the land of the short nights and the long days was Korway or Scandinavia, beyond which was the blessed land of eternal light and summer. For the Greeks to know of this, the tradition must have descended to them from some people more ancient than themselves, who were acquainted with those climatic details of which the Greeks themselves could know nothing. Even in our day, Science suspects that beyond the Polar seas, at the ver>' circle of the Arctic Pole, there exists a sea which never freezes and a continent which is ever green. The Archaic Teachings, and also the Purdnas — for one who understands their allegories — contain the same statements. Suffice, then, for us the strong probability that, during the Miocene period of Modem Science, at a time when Greenland was an almost tropical land, there lived a people, now unknown to history.
Note.
The reader is requested to bear in mind that the followng Sections are not strictly consecutive in order of time. In Part I the Stanzas which form the skeleton of the exposition are given, and certain impor- tant points commented upon and explained. In the subsequent Sec- tions of Parts II and III various additional details are gathered, and a foUer explanation of the subject is attempted.